Hooked On Supersonics

Concorde devotees loved its glamour, its look, and its celebrity cargo. Above all, they loved its speed. And if there were gripes about noise or wasting fuel . . . well, for most of the world that $12,000 round-trip was a champagne-and-caviar-filled fantasy. With Air France and British Airways closing the hangar doors on the only supersonic passenger jet, David Kamp considers the 27-year reign of “the white bird,” the misfortunes (the 2000 crash, post-9/11 travel cutbacks, rising maintenance costs) that grounded it, and the slender hope that its needle nose will rise again.

The final, forlorn installment in the Airport disaster-movie series was called The Concorde: Airport ’79. With the desperation of a spent franchise that knew it was spent, the film piled on one implausible scenario after another: a villainous American arms trader (Robert Wagner) who wanted to blow up the plane of the title because he feared that one of its passengers—his girlfriend, no less—knew too much about his shady dealings; a paunchy captain (George Kennedy) who had been only a mechanic in the first Airport movie, yet had somehow risen to the most exalted job in civil aviation; an attack on the plane by heat-seeking missiles that the captain headed off by opening a cockpit window (while traveling at supersonic speed!) and firing flares into the air, thereby “confusing” the missiles.

Yet the biggest implausibility of all was the Concorde’s passenger manifest, which included Sylvia Kristel, Jimmie Walker, Eddie Albert, Avery Schreiber, John Davidson, and Charo. This, as any aeronautical expert would tell you, was outright fantasy—no Concorde has ever carried such an appallingly B-list cargo. In its 27 years in commercial service, the Concorde, operated by just two airlines, British Airways and Air France, has specialized in shuttling the most elite of clienteles across the Atlantic: royals, sheikhs, heads of state, captains of industry, movie stars, rock stars, socialites—in short, the kind of people for whom a $12,000 round-trip fare (the current going rate for the New York—London route) is no big deal. The Concorde is where Paul McCartney led his fellow passengers in an impromptu sing-along of Beatles tunes; where Phil Collins collected himself between performances on the London and Philadelphia stages of Live Aid; where Malcolm Forbes treated his friends to a supersonic cocktail party in the late 1970s; where Miramax boss Harvey Weinstein sheepishly fessed up to sneaking a cigarette in the lavatory; where Rupert Murdoch, Robert Maxwell, Henry Kravis, John Gutfreund, and George Soros met up and talked shop in the pre—Gulfstream V days of the 1980s; where the Queen Mum celebrated her 85th birthday by strapping herself into the cockpit’s jump seat and watching the pilots throttle that baby past Mach One.

But while much is made of the Concorde’s glamour—the Connolly leather seats, the generous allotments of champagne and caviar on board, the opportunities one is afforded to see Sir Elton and David Furnish in slumberous repose—what its wealthy passengers are paying for, first and foremost, is speed. The Concorde cruises above the ocean at Mach Two, or twice the speed of sound, which translates to roughly 1,350 miles per hour. (The actual speed of sound varies according to altitude and air pressure, among other conditions.) A 747, by contrast, maxes out at Mach 0.83, or about 550 miles per hour. What this means in practical terms is that the Concorde halves transatlantic travel times: the New York—to—London flight takes only three hours and 20 minutes; New York—to—Paris, three hours and 40 minutes. Flying westward, from Europe to New York, you literally arrive, in terms of local time, before you left—a feature that has proved invaluable to such time-stressed commuters as Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, who says, “What’s great about it is I’m able to take my children to school at 8:30 in the morning, drop them off, then take B.A. Flight 001 at 10:30 to New York, and get to New York at 9:30 A.M., in time for my Weight Watchers meetings and speeches.”

In flusher times, when British Airways offered twice-daily Concorde service in each direction, an English businessman was able to fly to New York for a morning meeting and return to his London home the same day, without ever bothering with overnight accommodations in Manhattan. “Essentially, what Concorde is is a time machine, a wonderful time machine,” says the chairman of British Airways, Lord Marshall of Knightsbridge, who, back in the early 1980s, when he was simply Colin Marshall, the New York—based president and C.E.O. of Avis, was a regular Concorde customer, precisely the kind of hard-charging senior executive for whom the plane was a godsend. Nowadays, though, Lord Marshall is decried by Concorde enthusiasts as one of the heartless suits who have rung down the curtain on the era of supersonic travel. On April 10 he and Rod Eddington, the airline’s C.E.O., along with their counterparts at Air France and Airbus, the European aerospace company responsible for manufacturing parts for the planes, announced that the Concorde program was coming to an end, a victim of tough economic times. Maintenance costs were rising as passenger loads were falling, and it seemed wise for all the parties involved to pull the plug as soon as possible, even though the nine Concordes the two airlines kept in active duty were fit to fly until at least 2007—and even though, just 16 months earlier, the airlines, with much fanfare and at considerable expense, had triumphantly returned the Concordes to service after a 17-month pause that began with the July 2000 crash of a Concorde outside Paris. British Airways will cease its Concorde operations at the end of this month. Air France already did so on May 31, a day of rude awakening for the designer Marc Jacobs, who, in his dual capacity as the Paris-based director of Louis Vuitton and the New York—bred head of his own label, flew the plane one to three times a month. “I don’t like it,” he says, freshly arrived in New York after a seven-and-a-half-hour flight. “I used to get here by eight o’clock in the morning ready to go. But I got in at noon and felt funky.”

The news of the Concorde’s imminent demise has evoked surprisingly vehement outpourings of grief and sentiment, akin to those elicited by Cal Ripken Jr.’s 2001 farewell tour of major-league ballparks and Ronald Reagan’s 1994 “sunset of my life” letter to the American public about his Alzheimer’s disease. The French call the Concorde l’oiseau blanc, the white bird, and for many it really is as if a living, breathing species were being clubbed into extinction. “This day is to be marked of a black stone,” wrote “Laurent,” the florid co-administrator of the French Web site concorde-jet.com, on “Black Thursday,” as that April day has come to be known; Laurent further lamented the fate of those mechanics and engineers who “work ardently so that the white bird takes its take-off, those which ‘walk’ in [its] entrails.” The poor guy has plenty of company; it’s extraordinary how much the Concorde has captivated even those who have only ever dreamed of flying it. While it’s expected that Joan Collins would deem the plane’s retirement “a tragedy, honestly a tragedy!,” the distress is no less acute for Kathryn Packwood, a 46-year-old English veterinary surgeon who has never set foot on the plane, yet runs an informal organization called Friends of Concorde, and who has written passionate verse about the aircraft under the pseudonym Lauriel Aldaron. (From November 2000, in the aftermath of the Paris crash: “The cruel fire that downed her was not of her making / Cruel fate! That a bird should be tethered to earth / For shame you still doubt her, you pilots of pencils! / Now give us our Concorde, and phoenix, rebirth!”) “I’ve always been inspired by Concorde,” wrote Packwood to me in an e-mail. “Not long ago, it led me to try, and to succeed, in obtaining my private pilot’s license. More than just a fast metal tube, you see!” (The British say “Concorde,” not “a Concorde” or “the Concorde,” much as they say “at university” or “in hospital,” but also with a certain anthropomorphic affection: Concorde looked lovely as she flew over me potting shed.)

Since the April retirement announcement, Concorde flights have been running at or near capacity, the rich folk augmented by once-in-a-lifetime splurgers eager to feel the supersonic rush. When I flew from London to New York on the plane in June, I watched as, across the aisle from me, one such splurger, a 29-year-old Englishman named Simon Lawrence, proposed to his girlfriend as the plane reached Mach Two; he’d slipped a ring to a flight attendant at boarding-time and instructed her, as he later told me, to, “once we hit the threshold, bring it on.” A few weeks earlier, British Airways flight attendants had noticed a Spanish couple getting engaged in a more physical sense beneath a blanket. Eddington, the airline’s chief executive, happened to be sitting just a few rows behind the hot supersonic action, but, when tipped off by a concerned flight attendant about what was going on, he simply smiled and proclaimed, “Let them enjoy themselves!”

Concorde paraphernalia, always in high demand by collectors, is moving especially well these days. The two airlines have traditionally distributed parting gifts to the passengers, and all manner of Concorde-logo candlesnuffers, picture frames, dopp kits, and embossed Smythson of Bond Street leather notebooks have been fetching good money on eBay, along with the custom-designed tableware that Concorde customers have made a grand tradition of stealing. “On my very first Concorde flight,” says Lord Marshall, recalling a 1977 trip from Washington to Paris on Air France, “I was sitting next to an elderly French lady. When she finished her lunch, she opened her in-flight bag, and she tipped everything into it, literally everything: all the glasses, all the chinaware, all the cutlery. And when I finished, she looked at me and she said, ‘Aren’t you taking yours?’ I said, ‘No, I’m not.’ And she grabbed all of mine and stuffed it in her in-flight bag.” The larcenous old battle-ax had some prestigious company. Andy Warhol regularly stole Air France’s Raymond Loewy—designed Concorde flatware and encouraged others to do so “because it was collectible,” says the photographer and Warhol acolyte Christopher Makos. More recently, on his final British Airways Concorde flight, the couture designer Arnold Scaasi rounded up as many brushed-steel Terence Conran—designed logo napkin rings as he could, intended for a member of his staff who wanted souvenirs of the plane. “For $14,000, or whatever it is,” he says, “you should be able to take as many napkin rings as you want.”

But the death of the Concorde amounts to something far greater than a tchotchke rush, and transcends the usual mooning over the vanished elegance of travel, the lost days of Pan Am Clipper seaplanes and a Pennsylvania Station that didn’t resemble a toilet. The grounding of the world’s sole supersonic passenger jet represents something truly perverse in our sped-up day and age: a technological retrenchment. “It’s almost Luddite that something like this is coming to an end, a bit like making the wheel square,” says Sir David Frost, who reckons himself to be the most frequent of the Concorde’s frequent fliers (“around 20 return trips a year since 1977”). Even Lord Marshall, though not about to reverse his decision, seems authentically shaken by its implications. “It’s really very, very, very sad, a huge backward step for technology,” he says. “My personal guess is that, in the lifetimes of at least the adult community in the world today, they probably won’t see another supersonic commercial aircraft.”

The Concorde is shaping up to be a stolen glimpse of the future, a technology of tomorrow that aberrationally appeared in our lifetimes. Imagine if Nokia had distributed functional cell phones to a select, wealthy few in 1932 but withdrawn them in 1959 because they’d proved to be commercially unviable—and then re-introduced the phones successfully in the 1990s, by which time most of the original customers were dead. That’s what the history and future of supersonic civil transport is looking like. No one doubts that supersonic commercial flights will happen again someday, but the successor to the Concorde is, by the most optimistic estimates, decades, and not years, away. Four years ago, NASA scrapped its High Speed Civil Transport (H.S.C.T.) research program after Boeing, its commercial partner in the project and America’s sole manufacturer of large-capacity civil aircraft (having absorbed McDonnell Douglas in 1997), withdrew its funding. Though they’d already invested hundreds of millions of dollars in H.S.C.T. research, Boeing’s executives came to the conclusion that there was no ready market for next-generation supersonic aircraft.

The situation is pretty much the same at Airbus, Boeing’s main competitor, which is devoting its energies and resources to its new superjumbo jet, the A380, a double-decker, four-aisle, 555-seater that will start flying in 2006, and whose publicity materials boast of a capacious lower deck “on which lavatories, sleeper cabins, crew rest-areas, business centres—or even a crèche—can be placed.” (Presumably they mean a crèche in the British sense, i.e. a children’s nursery, though Airbus’s president’s first name is Noël.) “In the vast array of points we are considering technologically, supersonic is one, but a very small one,” says Gérard Blanc, Airbus’s executive vice president in charge of aircraft programs, whose responsibilities include the development of new product lines.

Blanc feels that speed is overrated, anyway, and that his company’s A380 represents the true future of commercial flight, where the priorities will be “cost, environment, and comfort.” Airbus pointedly advertises the A380 as a “green giant, more fuel-efficient than your car,” a line that could be construed as a rebuke of the 100-seat Concorde, which consumes about twice as much fuel on a transatlantic trip as a 400-seat 747 does. This, in turn, is one of the reasons that Concorde flights are so expensive: fuel accounts for a full one-third of the plane’s direct operating costs. As for comfort, the Concorde, with no first-class cabin and just one aisle down the middle, simply can’t measure up to the wide-bodies. “Time will not have the same value as before,” says Blanc of the A380-led future, “because there will be less disruption of your life, except for boarding and disembarking. You will rest, you will work, you will shower—you will be living your life as you would on the ground.” In this regard, he receives an endorsement from no less than the man who first broke the sound barrier, General Chuck Yeager, who as a young air-force test pilot took his rocket-powered Bell X-1 to Mach 1.07 on October 14, 1947. Yeager says he flew on the Concorde once, as a guest of the French government when he was being honored by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, and he found it “very crowded. I didn’t like the trip as much as I do on a 747 or a big Airbus. It was uncomfortable, it didn’t save much time, and Mach Two didn’t mean anything to me. Hell, I’ve flown Mach Three.”

But Yeager and Blanc might be underestimating the romance that speed still holds for the civilian Samsonite schlepper, as well as the aeroerotic allure of the Concorde itself. (“The pleasure of flying in it is almost a carnal one,” said Joelle Cornet-Templet, the chief flight attendant of Air France’s Concorde fleet, when the airline terminated its supersonic service in May.) In the bulkhead of each of the Concorde’s two cabins are digital-display readouts of the aircraft’s altitude and speed (in both Mach units and miles per hour), and when, during my two recent Concorde flights, these displays hit MACH 1.0 and then MACH 2.0, the cabins broke out in delighted squeals and flashbulb pops; even the trio of bespoke-suit wearers behind me on the return leg—lawyers with the white-shoe firm of Willkie, Farr and Gallagher, and obvious regulars—provided an animated running commentary on the speed gauge’s upward climb. (Fran Lebowitz, the humorist and devoted Concorde-ophile, recalls remarking to Malcolm Forbes on her first Concorde flight, “Is that the meter? You know, $1,000, $2,000 . . . ”)

The Concorde offers the added benefit of the actual sensation of flight. The takeoff is noisier and faster than on other commercial aircraft—about 250 miles per hour on the runway, a good 50 to 70 miles faster than a regular jet—and the plane’s incline at liftoff and final descent is steeper. (This incline is the reason the plane has its famous retractable droop nose: the pilots lower the nose during takeoff and landing so they can clearly see the runway.) When the captain switches on the afterburners to take the plane supersonic, you feel a little nudge in the small of your back from the extra thrust. Nothing so kinetically exciting happens by the time you’re cruising at Mach Two, but that’s because the Concorde is flying at 55,000 to 60,000 feet, well above the weather systems roiling the earth below, and nearly five miles higher than any other plane. You’re literally up in the stratosphere, far up enough to note the earth’s curvature through your window, and the sky outside is a deep blue you don’t see from the ground, darkening spectrally toward the blackness of space.

Those involved in the hospitality end of the Concorde operation have shrewdly conjured a rarefied luxe world to complement the stratospheric wondrousness of the flight. David Stockton, the manager of food and beverage development at British Airways, says he and his panel of chefs make a point of basing Concorde meals around what he calls “high-value products,” and what a semiotician might call “luxury signifiers”: lobster, foie gras, guinea fowl, caviar. “Intensity of flavor is important, too,” he says. “On a normal aircraft, taste buds are dampened down 20 to 30 percent because of the pressurized cabin and the dryness of the air, and on Concorde even more so. So we really have to go for intensity—a morel velouté with corn-fed chicken, for example, or a ginger compote.” British Airways also keeps a special Concorde Cellar, from which it selects a red, a white, a champagne, and a port for each flight. I was stunned to see that the champagne they were pouring so freely was a 1986 Pol Roger Cuvée Sir Winston Churchill, a bottle of which would set you back almost $200 in a wineshop.

Like the food, the Concorde lounges at Kennedy and Heathrow are meant to convey the heady exclusivity and vaguely 60s-futurist air of the in-flight experience. “We call them rooms rather than lounges, because a lounge is for the business classes—‘room,’ we thought, sounded posher,” says Sir Terence Conran, whose design shop, Conran & Partners, remodeled the, er, rooms for British Airways in the late 1990s. “For the Kennedy room, I had the great idea of using the greatest furniture of the 20th century—by Eames, Mies van der Rohe, Jakobsen, Le Corbusier—to reflect the Concorde, which is itself one of the greatest designs of the last century. But it turned out the Concorde customer wanted more ‘lounge’ than ‘room.’ What they wanted were leather club chairs.”

That the Concorde should be held in such affection in its death throes is a remarkable turn of events, given how unpopular and controversial it was throughout its developmental and early commercial life. Environmentalists and community activists on both sides of the Atlantic loathed it from the start, citing its voracious fuel consumption, noisy engines, and nasty emissions. America Firsters loathed the plane because it was an Anglo-French invention. And many British and French loathed it on the grounds that it was a boondoggle, a colossal waste of their tax pounds and francs.

The Concorde project began when Great Britain and France, having initiated separate studies in the 1950s about the feasibility of constructing a supersonic jet, realized that their concepts were similar, and that they would be better off pooling their resources. On November 29, 1962, representatives of both countries signed an agreement that had the status of an international treaty, meaning that neither country could unilaterally withdraw from it. This distinction proved crucial, because two years later, the incoming Labour government of Harold Wilson, casting about for budget cuts during an economic crisis, moved to cancel the Concorde project, only to discover it couldn’t—the first of many instances in which the sacredness of the agreement would trump the desire of politicians to kill the project. Two separate production lines were set up to build the planes, one in Bristol, England, home of the British Aircraft Corporation (B.A.C.), and another in Toulouse, France, home of Sud Aviation. (Through a series of takeovers, both companies are now part of the Airbus consortium, which is headquartered in Toulouse.) The plane got its name, the story goes, from a B.A.C. executive who’d picked it from a thesaurus after his colleagues made clear their displeasure with France’s suggestion that the plane be called the Super-Caravelle. Even so, the two countries wrangled for years over whether Concorde should have an e on the end, before Britain finally acquiesced.

The ever competitive Cold War powers, the United States and the Soviet Union, initiated their own supersonic-transport (SST) programs in the early 60s, motivated in part by a desire to show up the British and French. (Najeeb Halaby, the director of the Federal Aviation Administration under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson—and the father of Queen Noor of Jordan—remembered Kennedy vowing to “beat that bastard de Gaulle,” France’s president at the time.) But the U.S. abandoned its SST program in 1971 without ever having built a prototype—much to the relief of the program’s staunchest opponent, Robert McNamara, who was not only Lyndon Johnson’s defense secretary but also the chairman of his Advisory Committee on Supersonic Transport. “I was absolutely opposed to it,” says McNamara. “I considered it a plane that would be serving jet-setters but would be paid for by a progressive income tax on the poor, and that’s exactly what happened with the Concorde.” (McNamara nevertheless became a Concorde regular in his post-governmental career, which included a stint as a director of a European company that required his presence at board meetings 11 times a year. “It was a very efficient way to do it,” he says of flying supersonic, “but goddamned expensive.”)

The Soviets actually succeeded in building their supersonic jet, a delta-wing plane known officially as the Tu-144 but colloquially as the Concordski, because it bore a suspicious resemblance to the Concorde itself. In 1968 the Tu-144 became the first SST to actually fly, and in June 1969 it exceeded Mach One for the first time, four months ahead of its Anglo-French competitor. But the Tu-144 was even less fuel-efficient than the Concorde, and far more problematic. At the 1973 Paris Air Show, one of the planes (of the 18 the Soviets are believed to have built) crashed into a viewing area, killing all six people on the plane and eight on the ground. The Tu-144 never operated commercially outside the Soviet Union, and Aeroflot, the state airline, gave up on it in the early 1980s.

The Concorde outlasted the competition, but this hardly constituted a triumph. As of the mid-1960s, nearly every major American airline had signed an option to buy Concordes, along with such overseas carriers as Lufthansa, Qantas, and Japan Air Lines. But by the mid-1970s they had all backed out, leaving only the two manufacturing countries’ state-run airlines, British Airways and Air France, as purchasers. When Pan Am and TWA canceled their options in 1974, Great Britain and France, whose governments had originally envisioned orders in the hundreds, decided to build just 16 Concordes, to go with the two prototypes and two pre-production models that had already been built. Of these 16, five still remained unsold in 1980, so they were handed over to British Airways and Air France for a nominal “price” of one pound or one franc apiece.

The main reason that the rest of the world gave up on the Concorde was, in a word, noise. Because of the thunderous sonic boom produced when the plane flies faster than the speed of sound—the result of the shock waves of compressed air that form at the nose and tail of the plane, and then abruptly decompress when they reach the ground—the Concorde could fly supersonic only over unpopulated areas: essentially, bodies of water and uninhabited lands where no one was around to mind the racket. This restriction severely limited air routes and all but ruled out lucrative transcontinental routes such as New York—to—Los Angeles. Furthermore, the Concorde is a very noisy plane even when it isn’t flying supersonic, producing about 119 decibels of noise at takeoff—roughly the same as a 1950s-era jet such as the Douglas DC-8, or the Who at the peak of their powers—versus 90 decibels or less for most aircraft.

What this meant in the early 1970s was that many people who lived near or under the Concorde’s proposed flight paths raised their voices in impassioned protest. In America, citizens organized grassroots groups with names like the Emergency Coalition to Stop the SST and the Citizens League Against the Sonic Boom, with the support of such public officials as Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin and Representative Bella Abzug of New York, who damned the Concorde as an example of “blind, senseless technology which is applied at the expense of the general public.”

But while Abzug and Proxmire were liberals who objected to the Concorde largely on environmental grounds, there remains suspicion among Concorde enthusiasts that much of the organizational opposition in America—in particular, the March 1976 resolution by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to ban the Concorde from Kennedy Airport—was the work of protectionists who didn’t want a Frog-Limey machine making inroads into their business. “Of course it’s protectionism!” says the unimpeachable civil-aviation authority Fran Lebowitz. “If the Concorde had been developed here and not Europe, they would have allowed it to fly over land. Come on—a country that allows leaf blowers cares about one second of noise? If it had been a Boeing plane, I guarantee you, you could fly it to L.A. today and get there in two hours, which would be my dream.”

As it was, the struggle to get service into Kennedy, the nation’s biggest portal for foreign carriers, was epic. Whereas Dulles Airport, which is overseen by the F.A.A., welcomed the Concorde onto its runways in May 1976—just four months after the plane initiated commercial service on two overseas routes (for British Airways, London to Bahrain; for Air France, Paris to Rio de Janeiro via Dakar, Senegal)—it took two cases in a U.S. federal district court, two appeals by the Port Authority, and a refusal by the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case further before the Port Authority finally relented and lifted its ban in November 1977. For British Airways and Air France, the battle for Kennedy Airport proved to be well worth fighting, because the New York route turned out to be the only moneymaker for their supersonic fleets (with the exception of the once-a-week service to Barbados that British Airways ran during the Christmas and summertime vacation seasons). The air-lines experimented with other routes—London to Miami via Washington, London to Singapore via Bahrain, Paris to Mexico City via Washington—but quickly abandoned them when it became apparent that there weren’t enough passengers. Even Air France’s service to Dulles lasted only until 1982, though British Airways flew to Washington for another 12 years beyond that.

These early years of Concorde service, unprofitable though they were, are remembered as the most glamorous by aficionados. Air France hired Raymond Loewy, the dean of industrial design, to consult on the interiors for its Concorde cabins. In addition to designing the gorgeously streamlined meal-service accessories that Andy Warhol, among others, chose to liberate from the plane, Loewy also placed a wide black band down the center of each plane’s ceiling to convey an appearance of width in the narrow fuselage. There were (and still are) two cabins in the Concorde, a front one and a back one, and though everyone was subjected to the same seating arrangements—four relatively narrow seats across each row, divided into pairs by the aisle down the center—there quickly developed a status hierarchy, with the first seven or so rows of the front cabin considered the best, and anything in the back cabin considered Siberia. Yet a reverse snobbery also took root, with Sir David Frost, among others, demanding the second cabin, which was quieter and less populous. “In the back rows of the second cabin, Rows 20 to 26, you could almost always get a free seat next to you,” he says. This proved especially beneficial, given how tight the quarters were. “I was once seated next to my very large friend Lord Rothermere,” says the whippet-thin socialite Nan Kempner, “and I tried to get my money back because he was more in my seat than in his!”

Yet, glamorous as the plane was, and as pleased as its pilots were with its flight performance, the Concorde, as of the early 80s, was realizing its detractors’ worst projections of unprofitability. “I think there had been a £60 million [$97 million] loss in 1981,” says Jock Lowe, the former flight director for British Airways, who was at the time a Concorde co-pilot. That same year, Lord King of Wartnaby, a conservative firebrand in the House of Lords, took over as the chairman of the airline and was charged by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher with the responsibility of taking British Airways off the state’s hands and transforming it into a privately run company. One of Lord King’s first acts toward this end was to try to make the Concorde operation profitable. He set up what was known as the Concorde Profit Centre, essentially a mini-airline within the airline, with its own, semi-autonomous management team, consisting of Lowe and Brian Walpole, another Concorde pilot.

Lowe and Walpole were airmen with no background in marketing, but they turned out to be naturals. “We took a fairly simplistic but very committed view of ‘Well, we’re gonna make a profit, and we’re gonna make it successful.’ So the first thing we did was we actually said, ‘Look, it’s successful!’” says Lowe. “It was just words—‘It’s successful!’ Which was true—it was. We just didn’t define how.” The Lowe-Walpole team made sure to have the Concordes fly over major sporting events (subsonically) such as Wimbledon and the Ryder Cup, and drummed up extra business by making the Concorde available for charter flights, and by coordinating with Cunard to offer luxury transatlantic package deals in which passengers rode the Concorde in one direction and the Q.E. 2 in the other.

“The other thing we did is—I can give this secret away now,” says Lowe. “We did some research to find out who our passengers were. And it turned out they were presidents, chairmen, and directors, and they traveled on Concorde because that was their entitlement in their company. So an idea formed that maybe telling them it’s not that expensive—which is what B.A. had been doing—is not the route. I then had some research done which said, ‘Ask them if they know how much the fare is.’ Well, 80 percent of the passengers didn’t know what the fare was, because it was booked by their travel company or their P.A. When we asked them to guess, most of them guessed that the fare was higher than it actually was. So we just said, ‘Well, we’ll charge them what they think they’re paying.’ And we gradually put the fares up.”

Under the direction of the new regime, the Concorde division became, for the first time, operationally profitable. British Airways would never come close to recouping the original capital expenses of developing and building the plane, but the Concorde turned into a genuine moneymaker, ideally suited to the go-go ethos of the 1980s. And on July 13, 1985, the plane received, without any hucksterish push from Lowe or Walpole, the kind of publicity that money couldn’t buy. “I was asked to play the Live Aid concert in Wembley, but I was disappointed to learn that all my friends, like Eric Clapton and Robert Plant, were playing in Philadelphia,” says Phil Collins. “I really wanted to play Philadelphia and asked if I could just play drums with someone. Harvey Goldsmith, the English promoter, said to my manager, ‘You know, if he took the Concorde, he could do both shows.’”

So Collins took to the Wembley stage in the afternoon, playing a short set alongside Sting, and caught a helicopter to Heathrow for the regularly scheduled 6:30 P.M. Concorde flight to New York. “When I got on Concorde, Cher happened to be on the plane,” Collins says. “I’d never met her. She said, ‘What’s going on?,’ because I had all these reporters and photographers with me. She knew nothing about the concert. When I told her about it, she asked, ‘Can you get me on it?,’ and went to the toilet and put her makeup on. I didn’t know what to tell her, and when we landed I said good-bye, got off, and headed straight to another helicopter, which seemed to take longer to get to Philadelphia than the Concorde took to get to New York.” Collins arrived at Veterans Stadium just in time to play drums with the reunited Led Zeppelin and play a mini-set of his own. “I was supposed to hang around to sing on the ‘We Are the World’ finale, but I bailed on it—it was getting to be midnight my time, and I was too knackered,” he says. “So I went back to New York. I turned on the TV in my hotel room and there she was—Cher!—singing ‘We Are the World’ with everyone else. I don’t know how it happened, but I had nothing to do with it.”

Lord Marshall characterizes the Concorde as having had a “reasonable operating-profit performance” from the mid-1980s right up until the July 2000 crash, except for brief dips into the red around the time of the 1987 stock-market plunge and the 1991 Persian Gulf War. At Air France, too, the picture brightened, with its Concorde fleet becoming a de facto fashion-industry caravan during the winter and summer shows in Paris and Milan. Vogue’s Anna Wintour and André Leon Talley, the designers Marc Jacobs and Tom Ford, and the supermodels Naomi Campbell and Linda Evangelista all became fixtures on the plane.

The good times ended on July 25, 2000, when Air France Flight 4590, a charter organized by a German tour group, crashed in Gonesse, a Paris suburb, just minutes after takeoff. All 109 people on board were killed, as well as 4 people on the ground. The official explanation for the crash was that the plane had rolled over a strip of metal on the runway, causing a tire to burst; a chunk of rubber from the tire hurtled into one of the delta wings, puncturing a fuel tank inside the wing; and fuel gushed out and ignited, generating such intense heat that two engines failed, resulting in a loss of thrust that the captain, Christian Marty, was unable to overcome.

Air France grounded the rest of its Concorde fleet immediately. British Airways was reluctant to follow suit, confident that nothing was wrong with its planes and that the accident was the tragic result of a freakish chain of events, but agreed to stop flying its Concordes three weeks later. Both airlines’ fleets were refitted, at a cost of nearly $50 million, with added safety features. Michelin manufactured new tires more resistant to punctures, and the fuel tanks were lined with Kevlar, the material used to make bulletproof vests, adding an extra, self-sealing layer of protection against flying debris.

The Concorde had had an exemplary safety record up to that point, with not a single fatality in 31 years of operation. But the crash accelerated talk that the plane was an antiquated, unairworthy death trap. Even some of the devoted Concorde customers I interviewed for this article put forth the idea that the plane is a neato but creaky and malfunction-prone machine, given to midflight mishaps and forced returns to the airport. “I was on the Concorde when a stewardess told me they were going to discontinue flying it, and I said, ‘Well, I hope we’re gonna land in New York first,’” says Marc Jacobs, who had endured at least one hasty midair turnaround in his Concorde-flying tenure. Indeed, there are plenty of scare stories one could cite in making a case against the plane. Peter Duffey, one of the seven original British Airways Concorde pilots, experienced a tire blowout in the late 70s. “I was taxiing, having just landed in Heathrow,” he says, “when one of the B.A. maintenance men, in his white overalls, ran out, signaling me frantically to stop. The debris from the tire had destroyed the hydraulic piping, and we were losing the fluid that provides power for the hydraulic brakes. He had me stop while I still could stop.”

Just this past February, Air France had two separate incidents of note. On February 19, a fuel leak prompted the pilots of a New York—bound Concorde to divert to Halifax, Nova Scotia, for an emergency landing. Eight days later, after another Air France Concorde, the airline’s oldest, had safely landed at Kennedy, the ground staff noticed that it had lost a one-and-a-half-foot chunk of its lower left rudder and a four-foot chunk of its lower right rudder.

Yet the people involved with the Concorde argue that its safety record is excellent vis-à-vis those of other aircraft, and that its mishaps get more attention simply because it’s the Concorde. The British are particularly adamant on this point. “Here’s a civil aircraft going 27 years, and, for British Airways, it hasn’t caused a scratch on anyone,” says Duffey, who believes that the Concorde is “safer than it ever was,” and notes that the hydraulic piping has been rerouted out of harm’s way since his late-70s incident.

Claud Freeman, the engineering manager of British Airways’ Concorde division and the man responsible for the maintenance and airworthiness of the fleet, says there is no civil aircraft in the world that gets closer, more rigorous attention. “There’s a massive infrastructure in place to support, at the moment, five aircraft,” he says. (The airline’s two other Concordes are not active and are used for spare parts.) Freeman notes that he and his staff go out of their way to ensure that the planes remain operational even if a part fails or an engine needs to be shut down. “I mean, the aircraft is certified to have a rudder fail,” he says.

Freeman is among those who accept the official explanation that the July 2000 crash was the result of a single cause, namely the tire burst that set all the other events in motion. However, there is another camp that argues that other factors played a role, none of them having to do with the design or reliability of the aircraft. An investigation by Vanity Fair contributing editor David Rose, published in the London Observer in May 2001, revealed that the undercarriage of the doomed Concorde had been serviced four days before the accident, and that the ground staff, in the course of disassembling and reassembling the landing gear, had forgotten to re-install a part that helps keep the plane’s wheels in proper alignment. The part, a footlong piece of aluminum called a spacer, was found on a shelf in the Air France workshop after the crash. The B.E.A., as the French body in charge of the investigation is known, has said that the missing spacer didn’t make a difference—indeed, the plane, sans spacer, made two round-trips to New York without incident before the crash. But the British and French pilots with whom Rose spoke believe that with each takeoff and landing the load-bearing elements of the landing gear got more stressed, rendering the wheels “wobbly” and increasingly prone to misalignment. In other words, the plane was in trouble even before it ran over the metal strip. (The B.E.A. disputes this conclusion.)

After the tire burst, reports Rose, the plane’s already misaligned undercarriage caused the aircraft to skid wildly to the left “like a recalcitrant supermarket trolley with a jammed wheel.” This put the Concorde on a collision course with a 747 that had just landed on another runway, and whose passengers happened to include Jacques Chirac, the French president. Marty, the Concorde’s captain, was compelled to raise the nose of the plane and lift into the air prematurely, before he’d attained sufficient speed, and he had a fuel-tank fire and engine failures to deal with. Rose’s report suggests that there were still other factors that contributed to the crash, among them that the plane was more than six tons overweight for its given takeoff conditions, with its center of gravity too far to the rear, and that pilot error played a role, too, particularly the decision by the flight engineer, Gilles Jardinaud, to shut down the No. 2 engine, which, though failing, was not on fire and would have probably recovered once the tank fire burned out. I heard much the same opinion from an ex—Concorde pilot who didn’t wish to be identified, who said, “It was a cock-up by the pilots, and the plane was tail-heavy.”

John Hutchinson, a retired British Airways captain who piloted Concordes from 1977 to 1992, believes that the official explanation for the crash has had graver consequences for the plane’s future than the crash itself. “The reaction of the French was to blame the crash on a design failure of Concorde, and that led to all these tank modifications with Kevlar linings,” he says. “Well, Kevlar linings are great—I’ve got no problems with Kevlar linings. In fact, I was on a Boeing 707 that had a penetration of a fuel tank due to a catastrophic failure of an engine, back in 1968. Kevlar linings might have been a very good thing for that particular accident. But don’t kid me that that is the solution to what happened in July 2000, because it certainly is not. There were a whole lot of other factors that came into play. I think the consequence of blaming the airplane for that accident is that it’s left an impression in the public mind that, somehow, Concorde is unsafe to fly.”

As for the allegation that the Concorde’s age makes it unsafe, Claud Freeman says this is simply a big misperception. He was an original member of the F.A.A.’s National Aging Aircraft Research Program, which was formed in response to the 1988 accident in which the roof of a 19-year-old Aloha Airlines 737 peeled off in midflight, owing to metal fatigue. “And Concorde has never been perceived as being an aging aircraft, because, in terms of the utilization of the aircraft, it’s seen to be very low,” he says. Each plane is in the air for little more than three hours a day and, what’s more, actually benefits from the heat generated in supersonic flight, which burns off moisture and inhibits corrosion. Freeman is certain that, with the proper upkeep, his two “youngest” Concordes, in terms of flight hours, could keep flying for 10 to 15 years.

Needless to say, there were other factors besides the crash that put a damper on the Concorde’s business after the relaunch on November 7, 2001. “September the 11th was the day when we flew the first of our proving flights as part of the return-to-service program,” says Mike Bannister, currently the chief Concorde pilot at British Airways. “We were carrying passengers halfway to New York and back—all staff, engineers who had worked on the plane. The flight went really well, and then, a few moments after the last of the passengers got up and walked out, he came back with his mobile phone to his ear, telling us the first indications of what had happened in Washington and New York.”

After a period of reassessment post-9/11, both airlines’ Concorde teams decided to soldier on with the relaunch. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani even appeared at Kennedy Airport to preside over a ceremony welcoming the Concordes back, citing their return as a timely symbol of indefatigable spirit and triumph over adversity. “But what we couldn’t foresee was the overall impact of September the 11th, which was greater than anybody anticipated,” says Bannister. “There was an element of tragic events enabling companies who wished to make tough economic decisions, anyway, to say, ‘We’re downsizing.’ Then, on top of that, in the U.K., came foot-and-mouth disease, and then the lead-up to the Iraq war, and SARS. We started to notice some of our major corporate customers were writing Concorde out of their travel policies.”

At Air France, the situation grew particularly grim by late last year, with passenger loads sometimes dipping into the single digits. British Airways did better, but Lord Marshall says the Concorde never returned to profitability after the relaunch. Still, the April decision to pull the plug on the whole operation seemed awfully abrupt. Surely the airlines would not have gone to the trouble and expense of doing the safety refits if they’d been planning to operate the planes for just another 18, 24 months. And surely British Airways would not have gone ahead with a $20 million aesthetic makeover on top of that—especially given that, according to Adam White of Factory Design, the company that partnered with Conran’s design shop on the makeover, there are brand-new toilets, meal-service carts, cabin display screens, and transparent Plexiglas boarding tubes that have been built and paid for but not yet installed. Why not just wait things out for another year and see if an economic recovery brings about a revival of Concorde business?

There are murmurings that the British were willing to do just that, but that Air France, losing money, still racked with institutional guilt over the crash, reeling from anti-Gallic sentiment in America, and jittery about the February incidents, wanted out as soon as possible, and that Airbus, which also loses money on the Concorde, was eager to wash its hands of the plane. When I asked Lord Marshall, Airbus’s Gérard Blanc, and the president of Air France, Jean-Cyril Spinetta, to tell me which of the three parties was responsible for initiating talks about grounding the Concorde for good, all three insisted that it was a collaborative decision with no real instigator. But when I asked Spinetta if this decision was an emotional one for him, his immediate response was “Of course, very emotional. I think that all the people in Air France are remembering the tragedy we had on the 25th of July 2000, so our thoughts are going, first, to the crews and to the customers who were affected by this terrible tragedy.”

And Blanc told me that Airbus, in participating in the refit, was primarily interested in showing that the planes could fly again, not in reviving the Concorde program for the long haul. “I hope I’m not sounding too lyrical, but there are values that go beyond economics,” he says. “The Concorde is absolutely marginal in our portfolio, a small fleet, and the prospect for growth is zero. But this was a clear case that two of our customers were in terrible pain. It was a matter of corporate pride and professionalism. We wanted to demonstrate that the airplane could come back again.”

But making the airplane fly beyond 2003 was another matter. Maintenance, as opposed to safety, is the area where the Concorde’s age truly becomes a factor. The further away we get from the plane’s sole production run in the early 1970s, the harder it is to scrounge up old parts, and the more it costs to manufacture new ones—think of what it costs to service a ’61 Karmen Ghia versus a 2002 Escalade.

Late last year, Airbus approached both airlines and informed them that the Concordes were due for an expensive new round of systems improvements and equipment upgrades. (Bannister says the figure was $60 million per airline over the next two years, above and beyond already budgeted maintenance.) Lord Marshall, in an interview with the London Times in May, said that when Air France balked at the expense, Airbus informed British Airways that it wouldn’t support the Concorde beyond October of this year. “It would have made it much more difficult for Airbus if Air France and BA had presented a united front in supporting the continuation of scheduled services,” Lord Marshall told the Times. To me, he offered no such gripes, but said that any speculation over whether the Concorde can carry on flying commercially beyond the scheduled termination date is moot, because “the manufacturer has now stated, quite categorically, that they will not support the aircraft beyond the end of October. And without that support, I would have to say that I think it is inconceivable that anybody could operate the aircraft.”

This is the same argument Lord Marshall puts forth to explain why there is no chance that Sir Richard Branson, the head of Virgin Atlantic Airways, will succeed in his efforts to keep the Concordes flying under the Virgin banner. Sir Richard, the fur-faced corporate iconoclast and maestro of publicity, has won lots of popular support for his Virgin Concorde campaign, capitalizing on the widespread British outcry against the retirement decree. He’s had minions drape a Virgin flag over the scale-model Concorde at the entrance to Heathrow, and he half-seriously offered to buy British Airways as a means of taking over its Concorde fleet. That, he admits, won’t pan out, but he swears his campaign is “very serious,” and not, as many British Airways people suspect, a P.R. stunt. “Virgin is the only company in the world who’s turned up and said, ‘We’d like to see Concorde continue to fly,’” he says. “It’s the only chance Concorde has, and it would be just brilliant for putting Virgin firmly on the map on a global basis. So, even if we had to run it as a loss leader, we would like to run it. Although I don’t think we’d need to run it as a loss leader.” Sir Richard says he would remove seats from the front cabin and create a “superdeluxe first class,” and would make unsold back-cabin seats available on the Internet, “so, if, on a particular flight, we only had 49 bids for 49 seats, and the 50th person bid a dollar, and nobody else bid, we would let that person on for a dollar. We’d try to get an excitement going, and make sure that every single seat is always taken.”

Sir Richard met in late spring with Airbus executives to discuss support possibilities, and though they were unenthusiastic, he says, “We’re having discussions with two or three other companies. I mean, Airbus is not the only company that can maintain the plane.” (He won’t reveal who the other companies are.) But even if he finds a willing contractor for support, he’ll have a hard time getting his hands on the planes. So far, he has been twice rebuffed by British Airways, which is adamant that the Concordes are not for sale. First, he bid a pound a plane, arguing that that’s what British Airways paid the government for them—“and they bought them 20 years ago. We’re offering a pound a plane even though they’re secondhand.” A few weeks later, he bid £5 million (more than $8 million) for the five active planes, again to no avail.

At press time, Sir Richard had still not given up on his Concorde dream, though his chances looked ever slimmer. But it’s a measure of how deeply beloved the Concorde is, and how desperate its supporters are not to see it consigned to museums (which is where Air France’s have already ended up), that even some British Airways folk are rooting for him. Sir Richard and British Airways have had a long, difficult relationship. In January 1993 he won a public apology and a £610,000 ($900,000) settlement against the airline—the highest amount ever paid in a U.K. libel suit—after British Airways admitted to having conducted a smear campaign against him and Virgin Atlantic. British Airways operatives were found to have leaked stories to the press impugning Virgin’s safety standards and finances, and to have hacked into Virgin’s reservations system, telephoned Virgin’s premium Upper Class passengers, informed them falsely that their flights had been canceled, and switched them over to British Airways flights. These operatives also circulated unseemly rumors about Branson himself, including one that garbagemen were unwilling to pick up the trash at a London nightclub he owned because the trash included HIV-infected needles. The fallout from the libel settlement cast a dark cloud over the retirement of Lord King, the Concorde’s great champion, who lamented, “If Richard Branson had worn a pair of steel-rimmed glasses, a double-breasted suit, and shaved off his beard, I would have taken him seriously. As it was, I couldn’t.”

But now Lord King says he would not be averse to Sir Richard’s taking over the Concorde. Though he is doubtful that this will happen, he says Sir Richard is worth taking seriously “as long as the banks take him seriously. I’d love to see it go! I don’t know whether Richard’s got enough money. I know I don’t.” More significantly, Sir Richard has engaged in secret talks with former British Airways Concorde personnel to determine how feasible a Virgin Concorde operation would be, and who would run it if it were to happen.

In all likelihood, though, the Concorde will be finished by Halloween, and thus will begin the long pause before civilians again break the sound barrier. As things look now, we may end up skipping over the next supersonic age altogether and moving straight into hypersonic speed, meaning Mach Five and above. A hypersonic-research consortium led by a Scottish scientist named Arthur Hodkin has submitted an unsolicited bid to rival Virgin’s, offering British Airways a stake in its project if the airline lends them Concordes for research purposes. Hodkin’s group aims to develop aircraft capable of flying at 5,000 miles per hour at altitudes of 100,000 to 250,000 feet, levels at which the sonic boom would cease to be a problem. Meanwhile, NASA, though it’s shelved its supersonic research, is actively working on hypersonic aircraft. “The first application for it is space, as a possible replacement for the shuttle,” says Keith Henry, a NASA spokesman. “The military application is second. And we don’t advertise it as such, but commercial use is something that’s being thought about, though it’s decades off.”

Exciting news, but “decades off” is a long time to wait, especially if you’re Joan Collins and you’re supposed to be dining at the Ivy tonight. “People will look back at us and say how ridiculous we were, to make Concorde obsolete,” she says. “Surely there’s something that can be done about it, isn’t there?”